What are you doing to protect your office and corporate environment from spam?

It has been estimated that around 90 percent of all e-mail on the Internet is spam (including personal and business accounts). How much is that spam costing your business, and how can you defend yourself from it?

To determine the costs of spam on your environment, you need to take into account that the average user receives between 50 and 300 e-mails per day. If you conclude that it will take about five seconds per spam message in order to determine if it is legit or spam, and then delete it, then the time spent for that task alone can run from four to 15 minutes per day.

It’s most likely closer to four minutes because many spam messages come in overnight and take a lot less time to clean in one large group in the morning. But, for our purposes we will assume the average user spends about seven to 10 minutes per day cleaning spam. That ends up totaling between 35 and 50 minutes a week and 30-45 hours per year. Multiply that times hourly wage rates and it’s evident that spam costs money.

So, the bottom-line question to help the bottom line is, how do you fix that?

It first helps to define spam. Internet spam is one or more unsolicited messages, sent or posted as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantially identical content.

What does this mean for your business or office? It means that any e-mail received that is not explicitly applied for and is part of a larger group of e-mails (such as an ad campaign) is spam.

So this means that the e-mail you received from the accounting department (although not necessarily “explicitly applied for”) is not spam. Also, the e-mail you received from your local car dealer about the new low prices may not be spam if you signed up for it while at the store last week. However, that e-mail you receive for discounts on drugs most likely is spam.

Now that we have a good handle on what spam is, we need to know where it comes from before we can stop it. There is a handful of ways that your name gets on spammers’ lists. The first way is that you have given them permission. You used your corporate e-mail address to sign up for a newsletter from some online Web site.

You may have missed the checkbox that is asking for permission to sell your e-mail address. Or you did not read the privacy policy that states all e-mail addresses can be sold. The second way is that somehow a spam e-mail made it to your inbox and you clicked the little link to remove your name. This accomplishes two things.

First, by law, the spammer must remove you from any future e-mails that it sends. However, the spammer does not have to remove you from the list it sells and, by asking for removal, you have confirmed your e-mail address is legitimate. A legitimate e-mail address is worth a lot of money to a spammer.

A third way that spam makes it to your inbox is much like a virus. Someone has been infected with a malware application that is sending spam to multiple users. This is one major reason spammers do not get caught; they use our computers to do the dirty work.

Now that you know what spam is and where is comes from we can figure out how to protect your office from it. You should implement corporate policies about where you can use your e-mail address and educate your staff about the dangers of giving out your e-mail address; being smart about where you use it will help keep spam down.

You also utilize a good virus scan software. If you host your e-mail, make sure the virus software scans inbound emails. Keeping malware and viruses from your e-mail system will help keep spam out of your office. Also, many of these systems have a spam filter built in as well.

However, in many experts’ opinions, a third party offsite spam filter is the best solution. There are many available and a Google search will bring plenty of good results. But you may ask, why have a third party filter when my virus software does the same thing? The answer is that the spam filter is a feature of that software, not the core reason for having it.

The third party systems are offsite and their spam definitions can be updated within seconds of the engineers finding a new spam string. Also, when you use a third party system, your e-mail server is shielded behind that system’s spam filter.

Spam is clearly expensive and very difficult to fight. However, with some education and use of the reliable tools that are available, your office can become more productive without a lot of cost to your business. You are well advised to consult with your I.T. professional about the different anti-spam solutions available for your business.

Chad Holstead is president of Business Knowledge Systems, LLC. Contact him at 630-357-8385 or at Chad@BKSteam.com